In a musty church basement filled with bug-eyed men and women, a confession: “How come addicts in movies are so fucking beautiful?”
The confession comes from the man with Roy Orbison glasses and nervous ticks. Hands scuffling like he’s doing the jitterbug. Always one palm up in offering, always shaking.
Nobody likes his style: confronted, cut. “This is a safe space,” they heard on day one. “There’s no judgment. We’re here to heal.” But the confessing Roy Orbison likes to philosophize. He can’t help it. “What nobody tells you in the postmortem of addiction is that you’ve created a hole. You gotta find something else to fill it up,” someone had said in the first meeting. “Maybe we don’t create the hole—we discover it,” the Confessor replied.
“Come on,” the Confessor says to the circle. “They try to make these beautiful people look like they’re falling apart but they still end up looking like sexy motherfuckers.”
Everyone is distantly listening. It is June outside, it is the end of the in-between-spring. The city awakens, a city that does not remember winter. Inside the church and beneath the cavernous sanctuary, the huddle of confessors/lovers/brothers/sisters/early-silver-foxers still believe it is December. Winter is reflection. Winter is your cold rebuke; you live with your old self.
Someone offers—a father, a maker, a fentanyl-taker—“I guess Hollywood’s gotta sell the story somehow. Nobody wants to watch an ugly man get uglier.”
“Addiction is still addiction even if it looks pretty,” a lady too old for pigtails says.
The silence is listening. The mothers and brothers and fathers and daughters are listening. Listening for decades, for months. Listening and looking at the communion tables piled in the corner. Still communion tables. Thinking: where do they store those little vials of wine for the Blood? The Bread of Life is the silent Christ overlooking the swarm of lovely strangers/not strangers: the light that sashays in from the basement window.
Confessor/Roy/Ticks is thrilled the philosophy is catching. He is swaying in his chair: “Yes, yes! Like they show all this shit, like you’re gonna end up dead or your wife is gonna leave you if you do this to yourself. But most of us are hooked and we can still make it to our day job, you know?”
Most are exchanging looks. Then the father, the maker:
“My wife did leave me.”
The Confessor puffs out his lips. His shoelaces spill over the linoleum tiles, pale white worms. He distracts himself from his shame by rabbit-earing them back together.
“I had a heart attack at twenty-two,” someone else adds.
“ODed twice. Can’t even believe I’m still here,” the ex-PhD student says from the corner.
“You know this group is for like, meth addicts, right, Jeremy?”
“I’m just saying,” one palm up, one palm down, “you don’t have to be dying to rot.”
“This is a safe space,” Miss Connor the Mentor says. “We can share our thoughts freely and confidentially.”
The exchanged looks exchange again. Oh, we know. Here in the under-earth, our secrets. Here the worst of them, right? We mustn’t tell of our failure to willpower, willpower, willpower our way out. Would anyone believe? The collective looks to the single bolt of light and the sound of traffic jams. The lady in pigtails is tapping her foot. (This is like shaking her head.) In the collective silence that follows, the collective think: How do you talk about war?
A lady with crawling lashes says, and we know it’s over, “My brother called me last week. We talked for an hour.”
Claps, nods, mhms, and sniffs. Everybody’s eyeing their winter coats hung on hooks on the wall. The Confessor with a bothered eye—THIS is my issue…
§
Out on the city street, an Unknown Man emerges into the halo of the afternoon. Fifty years old, newly single, feeling too old to be newly single, but it is warm out. Mm. June. Sucking in the June. Whistling, whistling something familiar. What’s the name of that song? Janis-Joplin-something. Maybe I could stop at the deli on the way home—I guess I could thaw that soup—
When the Unknown Man opens his mouth to breathe in the June, to taste it, something extraordinary happens. The June comes rushing through his teeth—
A butterfly zips into his mouth.
“Oh!”
Muffled, doomed cough. Sootly, ember-ly, a whisper of a cigarette. Like breathing in a flower petal. Reflexively, he swallows.
When the butterfly hits his gut, sheer euphoria rips through his bones and melts the tips of his toes. Holy holy—he is flying. Feels like. It’s just a slight snap—two/three/half inches in the air and then plop! down again. A jump. A hop. A hover. A flutter.
Shit. No substance had done this. No woman. No experience. There was no comparison—and there was no aftermath. No gritty feeling left in the stomach when his feet touched the ground again, no dull shine of a someday-withdrawal.
Oh. My.
So then—the summer. Within the cocoon of heat an overflooding metropolis of flowers on his balcony. Three encyclopedias about butterflies from the thrift bookstore with the cats. Tower of Pisa stacks of quarters on the counter to pay. “A new hobby, eh?” Danaus plexippus. Candalides erinus. Names as beautiful/treacherous as diseases.
When the butterflies come bobbing up to the third floor and roll out their tongues into the gorgeous flowers, the man is there with the net. At first it’s just brushing their wings against his lips, it’s just watching them, trying their feet on his taste buds.
And then the Unknown Man plucks them, eats them, dainty and delicate as oysters.
Tiger swallowtails. Modest white cottons. The miniscule hairs on the wings, shimmering alive, passing into his stomach. Alive! And then—rising like a song in the middle of his kitchen—and dropping down again with a laugh.
The apartment beneath his, a child watching Elmo: “Has that guy been jumping rope all day?”
§
In the church basement, The Confessor says the same things.
The Confessor: “It’s the addictions people can see that freak people out. It’s when it starts to affect other people—that’s when they start to care. When it gets under their skin. So much for loving thy neighbor as thyself.”
The Confessor: “Is it only addiction if it has negative side effects?”
The Confessor: “Death is the only alarm clock for which we cannot hit snooze.”
The room is nodding. A man in slacks and a vintage The Smashing Pumpkins tee is nodding. The walls are half painted in a new green and this is reflecting in everyone’s eyes when the man says: “I just don’t—I can’t stop. No matter what I do—I feel like I can’t say no. It’s the dumbest feeling. I just—I must.”
This gets the Confessor going at once. He’s up on his feet, waving his hands, jiving with his whole body.
“Get this—addiction comes from the Latin word meaning devotion. Isn’t that interesting? Devotion! They always make it out to be this nasty enslavement but really addiction turns you into a pet. You can’t settle down until your owner rubs your belly.”
The lady with the caterpillar lashes has returned with another life update: “It’s been a good week. Seven months sober and my brother invited me to Christmas.”
Half-hearted applause. Smattering finger snaps, a flimsy poetry hour. We are suddenly intrigued by willpower equating to units of time: days, weeks, months, birthdays, Christmases.
“I think I will bring the Christmas ham,” the lady says.
§
June. July. August. A glorious trio of months. The laboratory of flowers is overflowing on the balcony.
The Butterfly Man thinks: Perhaps it is the creation of a new world that I long for, stepping into a place that blurs the self with the outer world, euphoria that brings a new life, a brief and fantastical life—the want to be transplanted, to be alien in a beautiful new world. Why are we like this? Am I alone? Why want for something Other than Earth?
Then there are seasons with no butterflies. The aches. The itching. The Butterfly Man must try: scraping the ashes of moths from behind sinks in gas stations and park restrooms. Green metal stalls like lockers, round rusted locks and teenage graffiti. W.D. can go to hell. Black smears behind fur coats in closets. Once—desperate—testing the legs of a daddy long-legs. All insects, perhaps…? A lurch in his spine, he drops to the floor. Furrier, a tentacular looseness. Horrid, rickety, still sublime, but it makes his teeth wax silk thread. I’ll take the hopping, thanks.
§
The Butterfly Man discovers you can order them online. Now he’s gone tropical. Papilio palinurus. The emerald peacock. Only those butterflies that grow in single seasons, infinite Junes-Julys-Augusts. When the order comes: small folded bodies drop from parchment paper. Pretty as candy wrappers—how do they survive in the world?
The buzz of the hive in the gut rubs like wasps. The long dead do not taste the same as the freshly dead or half-living. He throws up into one of the empty flowerpots on the balcony. Exoskeletons of the dead metropolis: plant stems killed by frost, dioramas of the Black Forest.
Still—hunkering down on his heels, hovering for half a second. It will have to do. It must satisfy.
Birthdays pass. It’s no good—the cold un-butterfly-months leave The Butterfly Man awake. Desire, limp and undressed, following along like a wandering ex-lover, tugging at his shirt. Or maybe he’s following It—reaching out to cure himself with just a touch of a hem, just a touch and the longing will cease…
At his brother’s house the nephew totters over, peering at him. “You got something stuck in your teef.” Butterfly Man tucks a raw nail in his mouth. On his finger: the thin, coiled spur of a butterfly’s feeding tube.
“Merry Christmas,” brother says. “Figured you could start pinning them.”
A string of dead butterflies. Pearls, prefolded. Oh—Actias luna. The lime-green wings of the moon. Butterfly Man nods.
“Thank you.” I need to end this. No reason, no Confession, just the urge.
§
It is January now, inside and out of the church basement. It is easier when it is bleak outside to realize: I am nobody’s pet.
Willpower! Butterfly Man stuffs the butterflies in his desk drawer. Takes them out. Watches a YouTube video and orders pins online. In the shadowbox, the butterflies spread their wings. Fragments of stars. The allure is gone, is back. Wants to, doesn’t want to. It’s too much work. It’s so easy. It isn’t worth it. He should probably.
Two months pass. Then three months, somehow. Willpower!
And then the buds of spring. White cottons, hairstreaks, seem to wander out of thin air. With April breath still thawing, they arrive.
Each one sappy, feathered. Each one making his heels glow and whimper. Four months turn into four inches—hovering in the kitchen, stretching the arms up, bursting against rented walls, rented ceilings.
No more Flower City on the balcony—now the hunger is spontaneous. There’s no rhythm. Zigzags between sleep, beneath panic, alongside happiness. No longer just a crutch—just whenever he feels like it.
§
The Confessor says: “Carl Jung says that ‘Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.’”
Father/Maker says: “Isn’t that obvious?”
The lady with the eyelashes—no! She has peeled them away. Naked eyeballs bone bare.
Sparkling like silver monarch eggs.
She says: “I’m going to travel. I need to experience life again.”
A bird slaps the basement window. Recovers, flies away. Rectangular Jesus-light marbling for a moment. The collective think: What makes us? Are we what we desire?
“That’s a great idea,” someone says (a young woman with a death’s head moth tattoo on her throat). “Maybe you can ask your brother to join.”
The room snickers, but the lady is sparkling.
“Oh, I believe I will,” she says.
§
Now in the season of hunger. Butterflies appearing from shadows, the corners of happy pictures, the backs of hands. Everywhere an opportunity. And what would keep BUTTERFLYMAN from searching? Shame no longer feels potent enough. There is no shame now.
When July storms hit, so do the wings. Protruding from the tops of the shoulders, slumping over his back. Dragging around behind him, flimsy, King Lear screams: We will all laugh at gilded butterflies! Crinkling and gleaming—dark black garbage bags slicked rainbow with oil.
There—butterflyman folds them into accordions at his shoulders. Humbug epaulets. Hoodies only now, even in the summer. The fleece will cover the bulk. No one will know.
One Sunday he walks into the church: “On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink!’”
Another comes to stand in the pew before the Butterfly Man. A man with chunky Roy Orbison glasses and a perpetual tremor.
If the Butterfly Man, the butterflyman, THE BUTTERFLYMAN could hear the Confessor’s thoughts he would understand: If we all thirst then we all must drink; each man chooses a poison to his liking. We must then choose what we hunger for wisely.
Lacy epaulets shaking beneath the butterfly-man’s coat. He passes over the communion cup, the wafer.
§
On the balcony again, still floral. Dragonflies shrill through the hanging baskets. Today a butterfly lands on the butterflyman’s hand. Ring finger. He brings her to his lips. Soft as a duckling. There is no replacement for love, he suddenly thinks. As if reading his mind, the butterfly pulses her wings. Love is the desire which has no remedy except for love itself.
“If there is no remedy,” he says to himself, “then perhaps love is the only.”
The butterfly bats away, swoops and hurries. Into the city of summer, into the billboards washed in white-blue beaches and alcohol bottles as big as men, bigger than commercial airplanes carting us from here to there, here to there, with little carts of their own, bottles the size of a pinky promise. Bottles a shade of El Dorado.
Below the apartment, the oblong jelly bean of the public pool shimmers. Someone has rented it
out—tiki torches, steel drums, a real roast pig bloated with juices. They throw leis, they find partners, the dark tops of their heads black seeds, their skirts, their shirts, opening, closing like flowers, sumptuous tulips.
Butterflies want for nectar. Want for sipping. The man’s butterfly eyes opened: blue morpho blinks.
The Man thinks: What I desire is either to have what I desire or to be rid of it. I am sick of the wanting.
Then he thinks: The hunger must change.
The butterflies murmur back: Your hunger has changed.